A critique of Murray Goot on party convergence

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Notes

The question asked of voters at elections from 1993 to 2001 was: ‘Considering everything the Labor Party and the Liberal Party stand for, would you say there is a good deal of difference between the parties, some differences between the parties, not much difference between the parties, no difference between the parties?’ (Goot 2004, 65). In 1948, the question was: ‘What difference do you think it makes which party governs this country—do you think it makes a great deal of difference, a little difference or no difference?’ One question (1948) asks the respondent to consider the difference of which party is in power, while the other (1993) asks only about differences between the parties and what they stand for (Goot 2004, 65).

Labor's support for economic rationalism, of course, precedes the fall of the Berlin Wall, and can be traced back to the Hawke government (Maddox 1989; Pusey 1991), or even earlier to the years in Opposition prior to its assumption of power, as Labor reacted to the collapse of the post‐war boom which removed the economic base of Labor's interventionist platform by adopting more market‐based policies (see Lavelle 2003, ch. 5).

Ashley Lavelle is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics and Public Policy at Griffith University, with a research interest encompassing Australian politics in an international context. He recently completed a PhD entitled ‘In the Wilderness: Labor in Opposition’ and is undertaking further research on Labor under the leadership of Mark Latham.

A case in point might be industrial relations. However, even here in the lead‐up to the 2001 federal election, Labor's policy proposals involved marginal proposals for change (Lavelle 2003, 228). In any case, neither party focused on industrial relations during the campaign proper (Manning 2002, 237–8).